Was Kyrie Irving’s FIBA breakout a portent of things to come?

Bert A. Ramirez

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Was Kyrie Irving’s FIBA breakout a portent of things to come?
The biggest buzz about Kyrie Irving before the FIBA World Cup was that he was teaming up with LeBron James and Kevin Love. Afterwards, people are talking about his own performance

 

The biggest buzz about Kyrie Irving before the 2014 FIBA World Cup was that he was teaming up with LeBron James and Kevin Love to give Cleveland an elite three-man combo in the coming NBA season.

Despite being one of the most decorated young players in the NBA, Irving, mainly because of the Cavaliers’ woeful record that saw them win no more than 33 games during his three-year tenure with them, never generated a buzz worthy of one of the league’s elite players. No playoff appearances whatsoever. Not even a whiff of any postseason contention that would have given the 6-foot-3 point guard some cachet.

But that changed, of course, with the US team’s dominating performance in the recent FIBA World Cup, a performance that eventually turned out to be Irving’s coming-out party with the tournament MVP award he was bestowed.

What a difference a championship makes. Irving is now seen not as a talented but oft-injured young guard who hasn’t quite shown the ability to carry, or even lead, a team but as a great talent who should be appreciated for what he really is – a multitalented, special player who just needs a few players he can work with so he can maximize and showcase his rare skills.

In that clinching 129-92 blowout of the Serbian team in the final, Irving showed what he can do on the big stage. Spotting the Serbs a 15-7 deficit at the start, Irving combined with team captain James Harden to lead a 15-0 blast that all but finished off the tournament’s Cinderella squad. His jumper with 4:28 left in the first quarter, which came before a six-point personal run that capped that murderous spurt, put the Americans ahead to stay and sent them off to an unprecedented fourth straight major international title.  

Irving’s sensational performance, which saw him shoot 10-of-13 from the floor, including a perfect 6-of-6 from three-point range, for a game-high 26 points that went with four assists, one rebound and one blocked shot, was the kind of play that was expected of the game’s elite players who failed to join the team for one reason or another.  

It also came after a semifinal win against Lithuania where Irving again topscored with 18 points to go with four assists and two steals. In that 96-68 rout of the Lithuanians, the 22-year-old guard again orchestrated a US attack that that saw it unload a 10-0 bomb at the start of the second half to break away for good.

Irving indeed showed he could do whatever his team needed to win. He showed a knack for leading his teammates at crucial junctures, providing the scoring when necessary (which was partly why his scoring did not pick up until the last three games), the deft ballhandling against opposing presses and the swift passes for easy baskets, and the defense that often led to game-breaking steals. He even showed he could take a hit and come back strong after hurting his lower back following a nasty fall against Ukraine at the end of group play. Irving had 12 points, a game-high four steals, three assists and four rebounds two games later, a 119-76 quarterfinal demolition of Slovenia.

He eventually finished with an average of 12.1 points (fifth on the team) and a team-high 3.6 assists, shooting 56.2 percent from the floor and 60.9 percent from beyond the arc, tops on the squad, while also norming 1.9 steals (second only to James Harden).

“With USA Basketball, you’re part of something bigger than yourself,” Irving said as he explained the attitude he took with Team USA. “I put myself in there. Whatever coach needed, whatever all my teammates needed, I was willing to do every single day. I think we all shared that, the heart and passion. You’re out there running up the court with Kenneth Faried, DeMarcus Cousins, Anthony Davis, guys who you’re fans of but who you never get to play with in America. For me, I was taking advantage of every opportunity with these guys, every opportunity with the coaches, trying to learn from them.”

“Irving showed the entire world that he is ready to take his game to the next level,” Antwan Staley of Bleacher Report said. “Everyone already knew Irving could score. But during the FIBA World Cup, he also showed that he has the ability to become a pure point guard. The two-time All-Star showed good decision-making, getting the ball to other stars while he was in the game.”

Irving, of course, always had the talent.  s a high school phenom first at Montclair Kimberley Academy and then at St. Patrick High School, he was ranked as one of the top two to four players in the Class of 2010, having been selected to play for the US team that won the FIBA Americas Under-18 Championship that year.

He then joined his own Team USA coach, Mike Krzyzewski, at Duke, where he was making a strong case for Freshman of the Year honors until he suffered a severe ligament injury in his right big toe in the Blue Devils’ ninth game. He would be sidelined from December to March, and would not play again until the NCAA Tournament, leading the Dukies to the third round, where they would fall to Arizona in a game where Irving scored 28 points to end his college career. In just 11 games at Duke, Irving averaged 17.5 points, 4.3 assists, 3.4 rebounds and 1.5 steals, shooting .529 from the floor (.462 from three-point zone) and .901 from the line.

He then declared for the 2011 NBA draft, being selected No. 1 overall by Cleveland. Even before he could play his first professional game, however, Irving would suffer the first of a series of injuries that would force him out of 49 games in his first three years with the Cavaliers. He broke his right hand after carelessly slapping it against the wall in a team practice, making him miss 15 games in a lockout-shortened season that saw the Cavs compile a 21-45 record. That was, however, still an improvement over the 19-63 mark of the previous season, when the Cavaliers lost LeBron James after he joined Miami as a free agent.

Irving won the 2012 season’s Rookie of the Year Award, averaging 18.5 points, 5.4 assists and 3.7 rebounds while shooting .469 from the field (.399 on three-pointers) and .872 from the stripes. He also won MVP honors in the Rising Stars Challenge on All-Star Weekend by leading his team with 34 points. The following year, he made his first All-Star Game despite missing 23 games after injuring his index finger and breaking a bone in his face. He became the youngest player to score 40 points at Madison Square Garden despite that face injury as he fired 41 to bump off Michael Jordan, who was a year older when he did it in 1985. While making his All-Star debut (he had 15 points, four assists and three boards in that game), he also won the annual Three-Point Shootout in his first appearance in the event, scoring 23 points to beat San Antonio’s Matt Bonner in the final round. He wound up compiling norms of 22.5 points, 5.9 assists, 3.7 rebounds and 1.5 steals as a sophomore pro.

Kyrie Irving showed he could be a pure point guard when necessary. Photo from FIBA.com

In his third year, those numbers would be 20.8 points, 6.1 assists, 3.6 caroms and 1.5 swipes, and he would make his second All-Star Game after having been voted by fans as a starter. The fans would be justified as Irving won the annual showcase’s MVP honors, collecting 31 points and 14 assists to lead the East to a 163-155 victory over the West. It was also during this season that Irving would post his first career triple-double as well as his career high in scoring. He had 21 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds in the Cavaliers’ 99-79 victory over Utah last February 28, and erupted for 44 points in a 96-94 overtime loss to Charlotte last April 5.

Such stellar play has prompted Cavs owner Dan Gilbert and GM David Griffin to lock up Irving for the next five years. They gave the three-year pro a five-year, $90 million extension just before he joined the Team USA camp last July 10, a day before James himself declared that he was coming back home to Northeast Ohio to rejoin the Cavaliers.

With Love having also joined James and Irving in Cleveland, the Cavaliers now have a legitimate Big Three that can even be better than LeBron’s own previous Big Three in Miami. This is because Miami’s triumvirate didn’t have a point guard in the mold of Irving, who could ease the pressure off James in handling the ball and thus save him the wear and tear that he eventually found himself battling in South Beach this past season.

No less than James himself expressed his confidence in Irving’s abilities when he said, “I believe Kyrie can be the best point guard in the league very soon,” which is actually a far cry from what he wrote in his homecoming essay for Sports Illustrated that said, “I think I can help Kyrie Irving become one of the best point guards in our league.”

No disrespect meant, but is there a better learning process for somebody like Irving to undergo than the on-the-job MVP role he played with Team USA in Spain? Even James knows that. He knows that one of the biggest pressure situations one can find himself in is fighting for one’s country and its honor in the sport that it supposedly invented and reinvented on the biggest international stage, where the rest of the world is challenging that preeminence. If one failed, an entire nation is ready to crucify him, no matter if there were doubts in the case of this team from the start. In contrast, if an NBA franchise loses in the finals, only an entire city or state is ready to hang that team, or at least go through a summer with a chip on its shoulder.

Historically, anybody who succeeds as a major player on the biggest international stage experiences tremendous growth in his career. Charles Barkley, after topscoring for the 1992 Dream Team, used that experience as a springboard for his MVP season in 1993, leading Phoenix into the NBA finals against Chicago. Kevin Durant, after his MVP performance in the 2010 World Championship, also admitted that experience helped his already outstanding game grow even further.

Irving’s own experience in this year’s World Cup figures to further enhance his growth as a player and a leader. Prior to Team USA’s romp, after all, not a few people thought that this bunch of mostly raw and inexperienced (internationally, that is) NBAers, half of whom has not even played in an All-Star Game, would succumb to pressure in the end, especially against a seasoned team like Spain.

But Irving used those doubts as a motivation, assuming his own leadership role on a team that ached for a few leaders. “We talked about it with all these guys,” he said. “The countdown to games, every day staying ready. Being kind of a young old guy on this team, this is my fourth year (as a pro) but I’m still a young guy on this team. I was trying to keep everybody as ready as possible, whatever they needed.  Whether it was advice, getting a rebound, a steal, encouraging everyone.”

Irving obviously succeeded, providing a steadying influence and a spark in the title game that turned an eight-point deficit, the biggest they faced all tournament, into a US juggernaut from which Serbia never recovered. It was as if this group just needed somebody to light a spark under it, and though Krzyzewski undoubtedly provided the calming, steady hand throughout, the team still needed somebody who could execute the game plan and provide the vital character inside the court.

There’s no doubt that the World Cup gave the basketball world a fuller glimpse of what Irving is capable of doing. And this can only bode well for the Cavaliers, particularly with James back and Love now in the fold and with new coach, Euroleague Coach of the Year David Blatt, now calling the shots and signaling a fresh new start for the franchise. While Irving may have to play more of a distributor now than the primary scorer he used to be before the Cavs’ makeover this offseason, there should not be any problem as he showed playing with this US team.

“Going back to Cleveland, everyone will have their assumptions of what’s going to happen, but I don’t think anybody knows what will happen until you guys see us play,” Irving said. “Playing with this (USA) team, you have so many pieces to go to. It’s easy for me to take a backseat when Stephen Curry’s hot. Or when James Harden’s hot. Or AD (Anthony Davis) is in the post and he’s killing another big man. It’s easy to do that. It’s not hard. I’ll have a different role for the Cleveland Cavaliers but playing for USA Basketball, these are guys I’ve dreamt of playing with. Guys I can throw it to anytime and I’ve no problem doing that, whatever is needed to win. And going back to Cleveland, I’ll have the same mindset, working extremely hard every single day.”

The question, of course, is if such a mindset will also translate into an NBA championship for the Cavaliers. Will the World Cup victory be a preview of more championship victories for Irving? That seems to be the next logical step for someone who used to be regarded as just one of those up-and-comers who was hard to pin down, but has now conquered the world, somewhat unexpectedly. With James, Love and company also around him now, the Cavs are hoping that conquest indeed will be just one of many. 

SHORTSHOTS: Serbia’s Milos Teodosic, the Serbs’ top performer in the 2014 FIBA Worlds, was the subject of serious interest by Memphis in 2013. The 27-year-old sharpshooter, who currently plays for CSKA Moscow, has however set $3 million per year as his minimum price. Could be well worth it… Kyrie Irving, whose father Drederick once played pro ball in Australia, was born in Melbourne, Australia and grew up in West Orange, New Jersey. Kyrie, who keeps dual citizenship, was thus recruited heavily by Australia to play for the country in the 2012 Olympics in London. But Irving declined, and the Australians’ loss was definitely the Americans’ gain… New LA Lakers coach Byron Scott, who was hired last July 28 by his former team to replace Mike D’Antoni, announced that Paul Pressey, Jim Eyen and Mark Madsen will be his assistant coaches for the upcoming season. Both Pressey and Eyen have been assistant coaches while Madsen won championships as a player with LA in 2001 and 2002… The Miami Heat have also filled up vacancies on headman Erik Spoelstra’s staff, promoting David Fizdale to assistant head coach and hiring Keith Smart and Chris Quinn as assistants… Contract negotiations between Ricky Rubio and Minnesota have not made headway so far.  Rubio’s agent, Dan Fegan, the same agent that worked Chandler Parsons’ maximum contract that Houston failed to match to allow Parsons to leave for Dallas, is believed to want a five-year contract but the Timberwolves just want four years.  Rubio averaged 8.6 assists and 2.3 steals in his third year with the Wolves last season but shot just 38.1 percent from the floor, his lone perceived weakness as a player, for an average of just 9.5 points… Brooklyn’s new coach Lionel Hollins says that he intends to start Kevin Garnett at power forward and play him for more than 15 minutes if he’s healthy. Garnett missed 28 games last year with various injuries and averaged a career-low 6.5 points and 6.6 rebounds in 20.5 minutes per game.  He is on the last year of a $12 million-per-year contract, his 20th in the league. – Rappler.com


Bert A. Ramirez has been a freelance sportswriter/columnist since the ’80s, writing mostly about the NBA and once serving as consultant and editor for Tower Sports Magazine, the longest-running locally published NBA magazine, from 1999 to 2008.  He has also written columns and articles for such publications as Malaya, Sports Digest, Winners Sports Weekly, Pro Guide, Sports Weekly, Sports Flash, Sports World, Basketball Weekly and the FIBA’s International Basketball, and currently writes a fortnightly column for QC Life and a weekly blog for BostonSports Desk.  A former corporate manager, Bert has breathed, drunk and slept sports most of his life.

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